Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 2 (of 2)

by Alice Stopford Green

Such a triumph was naturally followed by a fresh visit of royal commissioners in 1444.[788] Wetherby and the prior brought a long list of charges against the mayor;[789] while the city protested that Tuddenham and Heydon alone had made mischief out of their peaceful show; and that Gladman had only “made a disport with his neighbours, having his horse trapped with tynnsoyle and other nice disguisy things, crowned as king of Christmas,” while “before him went each month disguised after the season required, and Lent clad in white and red herring skins and his horse trapped with oyster shells after him.”[790]

Meanwhile the king had his own grievance against Norwich, for the city had unluckily brought a suit for £100 which it had formerly lent him, and now refused to advance any more money when he sent to solicit it.[791] Once more, therefore, in 1444, its liberties and franchises were confiscated. But now at last troubles began to lighten. Thomas Wetherby died, as well as the bishop who had supported him,[792] and the new bishop, of an old Norwich family, was for peace. In 1447 the liberties were restored, and in 1448 the king visited the city.[793] Two years later however, Heydon was again to the front, ready with Tuddenham to spend £2,000 in buying favour in high quarters in London, and £1,000 to secure a sheriff in Norwich committed to his interest.[794] It was suggested that the Norwich folk, the mayor with the aldermen and all the commons, should ride to meet the Duke of York when he visited the city, “and all the women of the same town be there also, and cry out on them also, and call them extortioners, and pray my Lord that he will do sharp executions upon them ... and let that be done in the most lamentable wise, for Sir, but if my Lord hear some foul tales of them, and some hideous noise and cry, by my faith they are else like to come to grace.”[795] The commission of judges[796] finally sent to try Heydon for felony, his defiant ride through the town into the abbey, the rumours that he was to bear rule once more, his mode of meeting and outwitting or terrorising the commissioners by turns, all these are told from day to day almost in the Paston Letters. Finally, in 1452, Judge Yelverton arranged some kind of peace in Norwich,[797] helped possibly by the poverty and exhaustion of the city.[798] By giving a loan to the king and a present to the queen with a promise to befriend her in her anxieties, Norwich got a new charter in 1452.[799] In this the guild of S. George, which seems to have been united to the corporation about 1450, was apparently victorious.[800] It was agreed that the day after the mayor left office he should be chosen alderman of the guild, and the common council was taken into the council of the guild.

For the next seventy years the citizens were occupied by strife with the prior, which dated back to the day when the Norwich burghers were given the city into their hands.[801] The bickerings of three centuries ended in a compact drawn up in 1524, when questions of jurisdiction, tolls, pasturage, water, and rights of way were settled; and it was admitted that the mayor, sheriffs, citizens, and commonalty might go to the cathedral church on feast days and occasions of solemn processions, the mayor with sword and maces borne before him, on condition that he claimed no jurisdiction, while the prior and monks “of their amiable favour shall forbear as far as they lawfully can or may” to arrest any of the corporation or the citizens during these great processions.[802]

Such stories of local wranglings might well be left forgotten and obscure if there lay in them nothing more than vulgar quarrels. But the political experiment of Norwich was one of such serious purpose and such singular quality, that even in its failure it kindles our sympathy with men who for two hundred and fifty years had been laboriously working out the problem of administration. With an admirable political sagacity they had used in turn every form of local organization to perfect their experiment in self-government. They had taken the principle of an elected jury and adapted it for use in their courts, their council chamber, and their legislative assembly. They had turned to the problem of the general assembly, altogether useless in its primitive and unwieldy form, and developed out of it (taking a pattern from London) a representative council which should guide its deliberations and express its will. The craft-guilds were organized, and it is possible that in the struggle their discipline gave order and strength to the commonalty. When the battle grew hot the machinery of the religious guild was brought into play on either side, and S. George measured his force with the Virgin of the Fields. No doubt these various methods have no claim to originality, being frankly copied from customs known elsewhere; nor is it in the discovery of a new path that the merit of the Norwich burghers lies, but in the sound political instinct by which they steadily directed their way into the broad track whose ultimate goal is civil freedom, rather than the narrow road of privilege. As we watch the growth of the house of representatives which was established among them, an independent deliberative assembly elected by the commons; and compare it with the chamber of magnates at Nottingham that by a fine mockery was supposed to typify a gathering of the whole community; we have a just measure given us of the value of this more liberal experiment in municipal politics—an experiment so early in time, so serious in conception, so strong and orderly in execution, that it might have justified an enduring success.

But in spite of all the ingenuity and sagacity and resolution which the men of Norwich brought to their fine attempt at ordering public life, misfortune still waited on their steps, and from the outset the disaster of the fifteenth century darkens and throws long shadows. For Norwich was fighting with its doom already proclaimed—harassed by the harsh dry climate in which fine cloth needed for the foreign market could not be woven; by the hurry of the new export trade which drove masters to set up their mills by the streams of Yorkshire and Gloucestershire, where labour was free and cheap; by changes in methods of making worsted which shifted the manufacture over to the Netherlands; and by the false economy which to help a failing trade, made English weavers refuse Norfolk yarn to foreign buyers—the Norwich burghers had still to endure the last calamity of pestilence, and the sweating sickness, which first burst on them in 1485, filled up the tale of disaster. Industrial difficulties alone might have been conquered. But a more insidious danger threatened all their liberties. By a fatal accident of position and circumstances the city, as we have seen, had been invaded and conquered by the county—by a society wholly separate from it in political developement. It had bitterly proved the truth of the extreme apprehension with which men of the towns at that time looked on the intrusion among them of “foreigners,” bringing into their newly ordered civic life the feudal traditions of the county magnates, scattering liveries among their people, and pouring into their law courts a commanding army of retainers—“because,” to use their own words, “by such maintainers and protectors a common contention might arise among us, and horrible manslaughter be committed among us, and the loss of the liberty or freedom of the city, to the disinheritance of us and of our children; which God forbid that in our days by the defeat of us should happen or fall out in such a manner.”[803] The story of Norwich shows that in a provincial town, as in a greater state, a constitution framed for home uses and needs may be shattered by the violence of foreign affairs over which it has no power, against which it has no arms, and for the guidance of which it has no instructions.

NOTE A.

Mr. Hudson believes that in Norwich the word “citizen” at first meant merely an enfranchised equal, being frequently described as “par civitatis,” and that from the thirteenth century onwards the most prominent idea which it imported was that of a privileged trader, in which sense it is used through the series of Leet Rolls. In one class of documents, however, at the close of the thirteenth century, he finds it apparently restricted to a limited body of substantial burghers, into whose hands the management of the public business had gradually passed. In enrolled deeds which have been examined for the years 1285-1298 a great number of persons are described merely as drapers, tanners, fishmongers and so on, while others are mentioned as “merchant citizen of Norwich,” or “tanner, citizen of Norwich,” and others again are put down simply as “citizen of Norwich.” Out of the hundred and fifty persons to whom the words “citizen of Norwich” are applied there are fifty who are apparently of no trade; and of the remaining hundred, thirty-two are merchants, twenty-four drapers and linendrapers, and the rest, about fifty, belong to a variety of occupations, but generally to the skilled handicrafts. No smith is mentioned as citizen, and very few among the butchers and bakers. From these facts the general conclusion is drawn that the word “citizen” was being gradually restricted by the most important burghers to themselves, the lower classes of those who held the freedom of the city being massed together as the “communitas.” (Arch. Journ. xlvi. No. 184, 318-319.)

The argument, however, rests on entries made in the last years of the thirteenth century, between 1285 and 1298, at a time when the state of things in Norwich was exceptional. The city rule was that every man who bought and sold in Norwich should have “made his ingress” into the town and become of the “franchise” or “liberty.” How often the law was evaded we see from the presentments of the leet courts. (For the last ten years of the thirteenth century see Town Close Evidences, 12-15.) It would seem that as the prosperity of the city increased new inhabitants had begun to flock to it who were far more concerned in making their own bargains than in carrying out the laws and customs of the borough; and who, especially the poorer sort engaged in humble trades, were anxious to escape the payments and responsibilities of citizenship. Blomefield (iii. 73) states that about 1306, owing to difficulties in paying the ferm, it was ordered that every one who had traded for a year and a day in the city must take up his freedom, paying for it a fine of 40s. if he were not entitled to the franchise by birth or service. Since every citizen was bound to have a house, building went on fast, and can be measured by the increase of rents from houses. For “in 1329 Simon de Berford the King’s escheator on this side Trent gave the city much trouble concerning a number of houses, shops and tenements lately erected by grant of the city on the waste grounds of the said city, on pretence that all the waste belonged to the King and not to the citizens, and that the rents of all such buildings should belong to the Crown (Custom Book fo. 2) by which means great part of the city rents, namely all the rents de novo incremento or new increased rents, would have been lost from the city to the value of £9 11s. 8d. a year, by which we may calculate the surprising increase of the inhabitants of this place from the beginning of Edward II. to this time. The small rents or old rents of houses erected upon the city waste from its original to Edward the Second’s time amounted to but 9s. 2d., so that if we compare the new increased rents with the old ones we shall find in about thirty years’ time nineteen times as many houses erected upon the waste as there were before, an argument sufficiently showing how populous it grew by its flourishing trade, and indeed its increase continued as surprisingly till that fatal pestilence in 1349.

“To remedy this imposition the citizens sent to Thomas Butt and John Ymme, their burgesses in Parliament, then held at Winchester, to complain of the usage to the King and Parliament; upon which the King afterwards directed his writ to the said Simon, certifying him, that by the grants of his progenitors, Kings of England, the citizens held the city and all the waste ground by fee-farm, in inheritance, and that therefore he had nothing to do to molest them in letting out such void grounds to be built upon for their profit and advantage towards paying their fee-farm. This writ bears date at Reading March 25, in the 4th of his reign.” (Blomefield, iii. 80-1.)